Show Notes

If you don't understand math, you can still enjoy Paul Nahin.
Don't get blinded by the 24 books the professor of electric engineering has written or that he's busily at work on book 25.
The longtime University of New Hampshire faculty member has just published The Mathematical Radio, a book complete with equations and diagrams.
One needs only the familiarity of advanced high-school-level math to follow along. But don't be deterred. Nahin isn't just involved with electromagnetic fields and frequencies. He loves radio.
"Radio is perhaps the single most important electronic invention of all, surpassing even the computer in its societal impact (the telephone doesn't depend on electronics for its operation, and television is the natural extension of radio)," he writes.
"Radio changed everything," said Nahin, quoting Reginald Victor Jones, the British intelligence operative credited by Winston Churchill for breaking "the bloody (radio) beam" used by the Germans during WWII's Battle of Britain.
"There has never been anything comparable in any other period of history to the impact of radio on the ordinary individual in the 1920s," wrote Jones in Most Secret War, his memoir published in 1978.
"It was the product of some of the most imaginative developments that have ever occurred in physics, and it was as near magic as anyone could conceive, in that with a few mainly home-made components simply connected together one could conjure speech and music out of the air," noted Jones.
Nahin isn't just a math whiz, however. He's also written about time travel and, in Holy Sci-Fi, writes about the connection between religion and science fiction.
It shouldn't surprise you but the 83-year-old Nahin also expresses a love for video games.